Data storage device product and process technology has evolved to the extent that many hundred-thousand data storage tracks per inch can be reliably used to provide a very high density storage space package. The end of this evolution is not yet in sight. However, as areal storage density continues to increase, and as data storage behaviors tend toward repeated storage of data in localized regions, new concerns are arising associated with adjacent track interference.
Some data storage devices use a write element to store data in the form of magnetic transitions in the storage medium. Ensuring the thermal stability of these magnetic transitions has in the past been successfully accomplished by constructing the storage medium for a substantially uniform distribution of stored data throughout the storage space. However, more recent data storage applications, such as point-of-sale applications, can result in accelerating the thermal decay, in that repeated writing to a given track subjects adjacent tracks to magnetic flux fringe effects that can no longer be ignored as negligible. Repeated writes to the same track, along with ever-higher track density, have fundamentally changed the assumption that “writes are free.” What is needed is an apparatus and associated methodology for preventive recovery of data corrupted by adjacent track interference. It is to these and other improvements that embodiments of the present invention are directed.